I haven't read through this Yahoo Keyword Density Analysis Comparison to Google yet, but thought I'd pass it along.
| Categorized in: Form: Case Study , Library: Digital/Web , Process: Indexing , Topic: Search EnginesFrom what I've read many librarians completly misses the point in discussions about between librarians, Google, and commercially produced databases. Many people seem to say that because Google is easy to use, it can't return quality results. Google may be easy to use, which draws people to it, but who would continue to use the service if it also didn't prove useful to them?
The quality of results is obviously relative to the quality of material available. So really the only benefit of the commerical databases is the quality of material in the database. If the same type of peer-revieved academic materials were available freely on the web Google would be able to find them better than any of the existing commerical databases.
An article in the latest issue of the Chromicle for Higher Education, The Infodiet: How Libraries Can Offer an Appetizing Alternative to Google, makes the logical (and completly correct) conclusion that librarians shouldn't be forcing patrons to learn to use these inefficient and clumsy (Dialog Classic?) commercial database interfases, and start designing systems that combine the ease of use of Google, with the quality pool of content from these database.